Musings of a Marketing Maven

As a marketing strategist, I often get a bird’s eye view of how high tech companies approach competitive strategy. It can be surprising to see how little “quality time” is allocated to a thoughtful analysis of the underlying drivers of the competitive environment, or assessing which moves are likely to lead to the best results. As a result companies fail to get the competitive advantage they seek, and over time fall prey to the forces of commoditization. [Read more →]

It’s been only a couple of weeks since I decided to start this blog, and I’m amazed at all the things I’ve learned since then. And the decisions to be made. Blogging is not for the faint of heart. [Read more →]

Our Leopard 5-pack arrived today, ready for installation on our Macs. The Mac geek discussion boards have been full of cautionary tales, so I’ve backed up my MacBook Pro and will test compatibility there before installing on any other Macs.

It will be interesting to learn how Leopard compares to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.5 versus 10.4.9) — and how the overall experience compares to Windows Vista on my PC notebook.

I’m particularly curious to see how the new UI lends itself to organizing documents, applications, emails, etc., by project (or in my case, client/project). If what I’m imagining is true, this could be a very useful way of simplifying the Mac workspace at times when we’re working on multiple concurrent client projects.

And if I’m wrong, it will have added needless complexity.

I just paid the last phone bill for my fax machine. Sidelining the fax… It feels like the end of an era — yet another unintended consequence of email and web-based services on a small business like mine. [Read more →]

I often work with an extended team of experienced designers, writers, web producers, developers and so on. Collaborating with other team members — or our mutual client — used to be a challenge before we discovered Basecamp from 37Signals. Basecamp offers a safe, secure, inexpensive hosted service to coordinate our activities. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and works well for both Windows and Mac OS X users across a range of browsers. [Read more →]

When you live near Microsoft and Amazon.com’s corporate campuses, you can run into some amazing people while grocery shopping, enjoying a latte, or exercising. Today I had one of those serendipitous encounters.

While power walking in the late afternoon sunshine, I heard about a cool new company that a colleague launched a few weeks ago at DEMO. (She was wearing her DEMO hat while walking, taking a break while her daughter was at ballet class.)

Her company is EarthMine, and it aspires to capture photo-realistic urban environments in 3D and store the resulting geo-spatial data as an “urban inventory” that will enable bazillions of applications to emerge. How about that for a mouthful? [Read more →]

Here’s a widget that will let you search my library for books on:

• business strategy, competitive advantage
• innovation and innovation management
• brand strategy and brand management
• market research
• customer management
• how customers shop, how they buy
• consulting practice management

The widget links to Amazon, in case any of the search results belong on your bookshelf too.

I love my iPhone not just because it’s an object of beauty in its own right, but because the experience of using it is so pleasurable, so much of the time. [Read more →]

I’ve just stumbled across a wonderful resource for book lovers — social networking for bibliophiles.

LibraryThing provides a handy way to organize your bookshelf online, and share what you’re reading with others, or discover people whose reading interests overlap a lot with yours. [Read more →]

The brands I admire most have a long-standing commitment to their core principles, the things the brand stands for in the mind of consumers. Whether you like the brand or not, you know what it stands for.

I suspect that one of the reasons brands tend to zig and zag so much is the impact of organizational dynamics, or the human desire to make a mark — what happens when a company changes its marketing agencies, swaps out Chief Marketing Officers, or lacks a brand steward… [Read more →]